


careful fear & dead devotion

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Aromantic, Aromantic Relationship, Gen, Mentions of Cancer, Past Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts, Terminal Illnesses, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 14:46:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2432627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He doesn't kiss you back. (You will kiss him only twice for as long as you live; this time is the first.)</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	careful fear & dead devotion

You can't figure him out. The worst part about this is that he already seems to have you figured inside and out, and somehow you're sure for him it was effortless: easy.

To say that Punk Hazard is the first time he takes your breath away—makes your heart stop, maybe—would be a lie. To say that it happened for the first time at Saboady would be a lie, too, because you felt lighter, then, and watching someone else wreak havoc was abstract, nothing to do with you; now it's personal, too close, and you're out of time and you don't dare lose time to _him_ , you wish you hadn't met him—

_you're on the palace floor, Joker's hand at your throat_  
_and Strawhat's so close but you can't hear what he's shouting,_  
_you should have gone alone, you shouldn't have brought him here_  
_as if you could have stopped him_

Anyway; the first time he takes your breath away is a long time ago and on the other side of the sea, when he faces down two armies with four sides and five warlords, charges in after his brother and never looks back. You're lost after that, and you take your ship and your crew and you don't let them question your actions because you don't dare pause to do it yourself, can't answer _why,_ you aren't thinking, all you know is that he'll die if you aren't there and you can't let that happen.

(At Punk Hazard you'll insist it was a whim; not strictly a lie, but _it was so you'd owe me a favor_ is a blatant one through your teeth, not a single grain of truth in it. Later—much later, when there's gray hairs amidst the bleached-white and natural black on your head—you'll suspect it was the will of the universe, pushing you; that perhaps the cosmos bent for him, as it does only for the king of the pirates, for the hand of history, for the world's heartbeat.

Later still you'll think you must have been lying to yourself about that, too, just like you lie to yourself about everything, and you'll sit across from a different kind of King, the one that plays violin like the devil and looks like one, too; and you'll remember when you first surfaced there, at Marineford, staring out the viewport and certain that you could see him even through the thick of the smoke and the fire. You'll say, _I thought I'd be a footnote in his chapter in the history books,_ and you'll think to yourself _I was wrong, I'm a paragraph, he swallowed me whole_.)

There are a lot of times he takes your breath away after that, before you lose him again for two years; good breathless and bad, as you see him break (bad), as you operate on him with your blood rushing in your ears with the thrill of it (you're not sure about that one), as you see him walking back out of the jungle with the First Son of the Sea (good, so good, no blood seeping out through his bandages, still breathing, still standing on his own even despite the adrenaline crash; but his eyes are puffy and red from crying, and there's so much pain in his features that you know he can't bear it, and that's bad, that stays with you, for two years and after.)

You hand him back his hat—

_his hat is being lifted off his head by the wind, sunbeams_  
_piercing through the holes in the straw to land on his hair_  
_you watch him for minutes before he notices you, turns around,_  
_beams just like the sunlight behind him_

His mouth curves ever so slightly upward in thanks, the first smile you've seen on him since he set foot on Marineford. That's the last time before the island of fire and snow that all your breath leaves you, gone like it's been knocked out of you with a blow: because you saved him; because he's alive but that means he has to be the one that survived, and you don't deserve to be so relieved when he hurts so much he hasn't breath of his own.

You aren't poetic enough to think you'd gladly give yours to him, not then and not later. You don't think it even when you understand at last what he means to you, when you let him set the pace and follow even though you swore you'd never be led; but some day the Soul King will suggest it and you'll laugh, half at him and half at you, because you'll never be sure whether it's true or just romanticism, lies for the history books and tall tales.

(You won't mind, either, because pirates are all about romanticism, the pirate king is a dream and a song and a folk tale, he taught you that; the pirate king is the soul of the wind on the sea, the yearning for freedom and open sky, a revolutionary that's more story than truth even before his story is written.)

Two years pass after that, after Amazon Lily, after you say _we're done here_ and gather your men and lie in wait this side of the Red Line while the rest of your worst generation paint targets on each other's backs and forget you. You don't forget him, but you fall out of his sphere of gravitational pull and return to yourself: to revenge; to acquiring a title that suits you less well than _surgeon_ but serves its own purpose; to realizing you've run out of time.

What follows is a rush: into the New World, your crew sent onward, abandoned, your navigator told to press on to Raftel because you know you won't see them again. The moment the indicator flashes to positive in your blood sample is a moment you remember forever; hope and relief blurring inside you, burning through you, _at last_ and _thank god_ and _wait_ and _too late_ all at once, your ghosts here to take you with them at last.

(If there were a hell—you're not a believer, save for knowing it's already here on the earth—you know you'd belong there. Perdition for what you've done, for what you've allowed, for living when everyone didn't; for walking the earth with stolen years, for cheating the Grim Reaper of his prize even though you didn't, not really, you died in that city as sure as the rest. It took the parts of you that mattered: the parts that theologians call a soul and you roll your eyes at, left only a shell and a name that you stole from your brother.)

_there's a hell and you're in it, in the lowest rung reserved just for traitors,_  
_holding a vial of life in your hand knowing that he wants you to take it but certain you won't,_  
_you've never seen him cry but maybe he'll cry when they throw you into the sea_  
_if you're dead you won't have to watch_

So you go to Punk Hazard, and you stay and you research and heal. This last is strangest of all, far more humane than anything you'd imagined yourself doing. You're a doctor in practice but not in spirit, you fight with a scalpel and it's been a long time (a _long_ time) since you shed the Hippocratic oath; the last time you played medicine man was for Strawhat, and before that it had been years. You don't kill with medicine but you do with impunity, and so they call you 'death' in the same breath as 'surgeon', like they're connected, like that's all that you are.

Being a surgeon to mend and not break for the first time in years ought to make something stir in you. You don't quite manage to muster up a facade of alarm when it doesn't.

(You purged that kind of idealism out of your heart a long time ago, when you first tore it out.)

_he never asks you about the secrets you tell him_  
_he never asks why you think you're dead either_  
_three years out at sea, two and a half without him,_  
_and when you return he never asks what you did,_  
_only pulls you forward with him again_

And then you see Strawhat again, unexpected, dashing towards you through the snow on the back of one of Caesar's chimeras like an absurd caricature of a knight: his smile splitting his face, his hands in the air, shouting your name at the top of his lungs and mangling it absolutely.

And it's a lie, a dirty one, that it's the first time he takes your breath away; but this is the time that it matters and so this is the time that you count, because after that he never does give it back.

*

It ought to end there. Circular, neat. An alliance without anything more. It doesn't. 

The day you depart on board his ship with Monet at your side and his crew watching the both of you like you're venomous snakes is the day that you nearly kill him.

You think later that it's ridiculous, that the time the pirate king comes closest to his demise isn't against an enemy, isn't in battle, that no soul save for the two of you knows how close that line runs.

It's over something foolish, of course. He rounds a corner onto the deck where you stand and he jumps on you, all laughter and rubber limbs and _tackling you to the ground,_ and it ought to be fine but you're broken, your wires are crossed, you don't work right. And so when he pins your left wrist to the floor and sits on your stomach you see something else and not him, a vision of cruelty and foul memories and Joker's laughter, Joker's voice saying _Law, Law_ with a relish that nauseates—

You throw Strawhat across the room and into a bulkhead, and you warp through the space between you that you've created, and you're pressing your blade to his neck before your brain has had a chance to catch up to your fear.

You almost press it far enough, unthinking, following through with the motion, the need to fight back visceral, no one holds you down unless they want to hurt you.

_you thought the nightmares would go away after he died but you still_  
_wake every other night drenched in sweat, featherspainfearpainfear in your head_  
_the phantom feeling of strings wrapped 'round your wrists_  
_a hangman's noose is just dozens of strings wound together_

Only he croaks "Torao!" and that's so out-of-place amidst your memories that it halts you, jerks you out of your fugue. You come back to yourself, and what you find is yourself with your blade against the neck of an ally, against _his neck_ , so close to slicing through the flesh that you can see a droplet of blood running down to the dip of his throat; and you're shaking so hard you don't know how you're upright, and you're so glad for his foolish nickname, for his stubborn refusal to learn how to say _Trafalgar_ , and that just makes you shake harder.

_can he say it, you want to know, is he really doing it out of ignorance; but he won't be goaded,_  
_he says you're Torao and that's all there is to it, he won't admit (does he even remember?)_  
_to whether it's a mistake or a taunt or something he always meant_  


All you manage to get out just then is _don't do that again,_ with _ever_ tacked on for good measure, and then you leave and you _flee_ and you sit on the far side of the deck with Caesar chained and dozing beside you and you try not to vomit; because you almost killed him, you almost did it, _you_.

And you know without a shade of a doubt that had it been anyone but him and _Torao_ nothing could have stopped you, and you'd be left with a severed head and no doubts that you'd done the right thing, either, self-defense at the cost of chances, at the cost of plans.

It ought to be the end of your alliance, this occasion. It ought to be the end of everything; but when you go to him at last, when you're no longer coming apart at the seams and can say your rough sorry without a stumble, well.

He looks at you with a serious gaze and he says "I understand," and, "I don't know who hurt you, but if I ever meet them I'll _kick their ass_ ," and then he takes your hand before you can ask what he's doing and kisses your palm.

You stand looking after him as he skips away, after, your hand half-raised, shellshocked and dumbfounded; that he would do something like that so casually, that he forgives so easily, that he would touch—like it's nothing! like it's simple!—the plaster-white marks of disease on your skin without even flinching. You've been called _leper, plaguebringer_ , a dozen other things besides; you remember to this day how the whole of the Donquixote family jumped (it's almost funny, now) when they realized the origins of your discoloration.

You don't understand him at all. Just then you're not sure that he understands you, either, because it's always impossible to tell what he's thinking, or even if he's thinking at all.

*

Then comes Dressrosa and your would-be execution, only the guillotine (so to speak) misses your neck; or maybe it's more right to say that Strawhat pulls you from underneath it, cuts down the noose meant for you. You hate him for it, and in the moment, lightheaded with blood loss and going into shock, Joker's heart still hot in your hand, you kiss him. 

He doesn't kiss you back. (You will kiss him only twice for as long as you live; this time is the first.)

You let him go quickly, relief giving way to horror, the realization that you're sending all the wrong signals canceling out everything else. You say: "That wasn't," and "I didn't mean," and in as few words as possible you explain it was the victory rush, disbelief, something you couldn't contain.

It leaves you speechless when he grins down at you from where you've pulled him onto your chest and says "I don't mind, if it was something you needed." He's forgiven you far too many times already, for nearly killing him, for lying and manipulating and using him, for saving his life. You hate him for saving yours so much that you want to kill him, but you know it's only fair, his cursing you with life for doing it to him.

You made him live in a world without his brother; he's left you alive to face the death you deserve. Your suffering finds balance, a kiss and thirty pieces of silver for both of you, each thrown to the wolves by the other.

He probably doesn't think of it like that, and when the truth spills out of you and you shout at him and grip his shirt 'til your knuckles ache he says, "But I don't want you to die," and so you know for certain. You apologize without meaning to, and you do mean to tell him he's selfish; but the blood loss gets the best of you, then, and you black out beside him with Joker's blood still wet on your hands and Strawhat's hand in your hair, eucharist and benediction.

*

When you wake you're onboard their ship and far from Dressrosa, and Strawhat's crew and Monet are banged-up but alive, bright-eyed with victory and escape.

Their reindeer doctor, so different from you, a healer in all the ways that you aren't (for all that with his half-human body he'll probably live just as long) presses fever medicine into your hands as soon as he sees you're awake. He's worried and eager, and you wish instantly that he'd leave you alone.

_Gold Roger was sick, too, Strawhat tells you, set to die even before the axe found his neck;_  
_if that's supposed to be consolation you don't see it, it just sounds like_  
_everything that you've been through,_  
_everything you don't want for him_  


Once you've declined to take it and admitted to your impending fate, it's worse. His eagerness is exhausting, and his optimism idiotic; and once he's drawn your blood and scuttled off to his chemistry set and his books somewhere in the ship's belly you fall back asleep on the cot in the medbay, curled against the cabin wall with your fever.

You start thinking of the medbay cot as your deathbed, after that, because you calculated your time and the rate of your cancer, factored in how little time you've spent recently on weeding it out of your system. You know (you pray) that you won't make it to Zou.

This time around the thing that's killing you is invisible—not a stark spread of white across every limb, not there for everyone to see—but your bones hurt in a way that's all too familiar, a way that you knew during all your years as a child. The pale city is in your bones and your bloodstream, endemic to every cell; the very code to your system is damaged, warped by exposure.

And Strawhat, who is responsible for your being here; Strawhat, who you kissed but don't know what you feel towards; Strawhat, who doesn't act towards his crew like he does towards you but who didn't kiss you back—

_you don't dream about it, not once, not as it was nor as it could be._  
_your imagination dredges up only nightmares and nothing as simple as_  
_sorry, didn't mean it, an accident of timing_

The first night he shows up to flop unceremoniously next to you on the too-narrow cot you're caught in too much pain and insomnia to even consider trying to sleep, and he doesn't ask for permission.

You end up with his hair brushing the underside of your chin and he drools on your shoulder and he talks in his sleep—talks about _food_ —and you curse yourself for how close he's gotten that you aren't even slightly surprised. You never do manage to sleep, and your bones still ache; but it's better with him than without, and as you drift between the dull pulse of pain and the downward drag of exhaustion you think that this is familiar, too.

He shows up every night thereafter, too; always well after dinner and right around the time the evening flare-up of your pain gets hardest to bear. You have no idea if he knows that, or if it's just coincidence, dumb luck and accident. With him it's never seemed to matter, he's luck and happy coincidence incarnate.

It's on a night when you've managed a light doze—just out of reach of nightmares that you would remember, skimming the surface of the ones you forget—that you're woken up by the sound of quiet sobbing, and it's a sound so unlike him that at first you think it must have come from you.

But no: there's tears rolling down his face (you know because they land on your shoulder, because of course he's burrowed against you during the night), and Strawhat, the boy with the huge smile and irrepressible cheer, is crying in his sleep.

Your deliberation of whether you ought to wake him is ended abruptly when you hear him mutter " _Ace_ ," and you push at his shoulder, pull awkwardly at his rubber cheek; and you say _Strawhat,_ and _Strawhat, wake up,_ and _Luffy_ —

_he cries his brother's name, loud enough that it echoes_  
_against the walls of your submarine medbay. there isn't anything you can do,_  
_not when waking him from his nightmares would reveal a reality just as cruel_  
_instead you sit at his bedside late into the night,_  
_keep an eye on his monitors, adjust the anæsthesia;_  
_and until he dives into deeper unconsciousness you let him_  
_grasp your hand with his, let him squeeze your fingers_  
_'til it hurts, the strength is reassuring even as_  
_it tells you the magnitude of your crime_

The sound of his name wakes him at last, and he starts against your shoulder and inhales, loud, while you try to mutter reassurance. You don't know what to say, not really, because his brother's still dead, still gone; but he saves you by starting to talk himself, so much quieter than you're used to hearing him shout.

Apropos of nothing he tells you about growing up with his brother, and about his other brother, too: Sabo, now Chief of Staff for the idealist revolutionaries, the bearer of Ace's fire. Strawhat talks for hours, tells you with laughter muffled against your shoulder about adventures in an East Blue jungle, tells you far more grimly about the Gray Terminal and believing Sabo had died.

And when he's done—when his story comes to a staggering stop at the moment he looked at Ace's vivrecard and saw it burning, when there's nothing left to tell—there's a pause, a silence. For a long moment you don't know how to respond to this outpouring of secrets, things you don't think he's told anyone else.

And then, before you can give yourself time to talk yourself out of it, you start talking too.

*

You've never told this story; not in parts, not all at once, not to anyone. You tell it without stopping because if you stop you think it might catch in your throat and never come out, and you tell the whole truth, everything: about your city, your parents, your brother, your stolen name.

(You almost stumble over this last, almost say the lie you've constructed for yourself for just such an occasion. But his breathing is so even against your side, his attention so unexpectedly focused, and of all the people you've met you're certain he'd be the most likely to understand. You've only ever seen him take anyone at face value; you've experienced his unconditional trust.)

And so you manage to get out the name your parents gave you, _Lamie_ , and you admit to a version of you that lived so long ago she may as well have never existed; and if you don't say _I died in that city just like everyone else_ you suspect he gets it, anyway.

He doesn't dispute a word that you say, doesn't talk at all until you're starting to slur your words from exhaustion and the persistent ache in your bones. When at last you're hardly able to get another word out he says only, "Thanks, Torao," his voice filled with gratitude.

The nickname settles warm in your chest, right around where your heart ought to be; and if your own mumbled _thank you_ is lost as you slide into sleep, you don't think he minds.

*

The reindeer finds you a cure.

Your first reaction is incredulity. You couldn't do it, your parents either, not any of the doctors of Frevance; that this odd little doctor, this _child_ —

_father's the best doctor in the country and you tell your brother_  
_that he'll find a way, you'll all make it, he'll figure it out,_  
_only you know it's not true because you_  
_stood outside the doorway and listened_  
_while your father told your mother that there isn't time_  
_there's no chance for anyone,_  
_not with the soldiers approaching_

But he explains the process, and you find it scientifically sound; and when he tells you about the ancient library and the records of the government's knowledge of all the amber lead could do, about finding all their records and tests, you can't even find it in yourself to feel intellectual envy.

You believe him, and when at last it hits you that your salvation is being held out in front of you, freely given, absolute, all you can think is _no_.

It's not a surprise, the realization that you don't want to survive this. Your whole life you've been living on a timer, the knowledge that the minutes were ticking down to one end or another; and you're tired, you're _tired_ , your head filled with nightmares and broken wires and memories you wish you could burn.

You want it to end. You want to be finished. You want to die.

You want it more than you've wanted anything in a very long time.

Aloud, you say only "I don't want it," an echo of your refusal before. You can see the reindeer's upset coming from a mile off, and when you try to mitigate with "It's not your medical skill, it's about escaping one's demons," there's tears, too.

By the time he dashes out the door and leaves you to silence your head is pounding bad enough to match the acidic pulse in your bones. Worse, you know he's going to tell, and you know what everyone on the ship is going to know: Trafalgar Law wants to die, Trafalgar Law has given up, Trafalgar Law is just a _coward._

Only: you get to choose. You get to choose how you die and when—dictated by yourself, no one else. It's a choice the weak and the cowardly don't get to make, if that's something you still believe; the only true thing Joker ever told you, the only thing you didn't try to claw out of yourself when you ran.

 _The weak don't get to choose how they die._ You say it aloud, test it again on your tongue, and you think of Joker's severed head at your feet and his heart oozing in your palm as you crushed it.

What it says that he didn't choose, for all that you could never think him weak—

_he's not a king but he looks like one, he's power made flesh:_  
_from the moment you walk into his throne room you hate him intensely, admire him endlessly._  
_the others tremble in fear when he looks at them and he looks at you like_  
_a favored tool, if you live he'll give you a throne and an army, he'll plant the devil in you,_  
_he's sadistic and cruel and you will be, too, you'll do what he does to you_  
_and you'll do it better, you'll burn humanity to the ground_  
_just like they burned your family's bones_

In the end it doesn't matter. You curl back against the wall, shift hopelessly to find a way to lie that doesn't hurt, and you wait.

*

You expect Strawhat to be as indignantly furious as Chopper. You expect the same selfish _I don't want you to die_ as when you told him something would take you away despite all his efforts.

Strawhat doesn't say anything, and you don't understand him, you don't. (Except that maybe the difference is that this time it's not someone else taking your life, it's you, and Strawhat doesn't understand boundaries right up until he does; and so this time he won't interfere.)

He still sleeps by your side every night, and during one day he even manages to coax you into sitting up to take pictures with him using a camera borrowed from the long-nosed sniper. The black-and-white photographs that slide out of the machine are almost enough to make you smile: a blurry shot with his thumb in the corner and you looking startled as he slings his rubber arm around your shoulders, a clearer one with him smiling hugely as he squeezes you into the shot with a hug. In the third, you're pulling him off yourself by the ear.

While he laughs at your irritated expression caught by the camera you find yourself sobered by the sight of the splotches spread over your face, despite everything. You hate mirrors and photos, the only image of yourself you've ever been able to tolerate is the one that reads _440 million berries_ ; and though you've never covered the marks, always chosen to wear them for everyone to see, you still can't stand to see the reminder yourself.

Strawhat thinks every single one of the pictures is perfect. You don't bother to disagree.

*

And at the end of it, because you don't understand him still, he saves your life again.

(You don't know it at the time, of course. It's nothing so straightforward, so simple; you only learn this weeks later, when you're feeling well enough again to climb up to the crow's nest at night, and it's Nico Robin that tells you. When she does you laugh 'til you cry, and she says _he'll let you play cards but he'll stack the deck_ ; and you bury your face against your knees and the laughter pours out of you until she steers you down to the kitchen, _you still need to eat, Trafalgar_. You can't remember having ever laughed like that before.)

He saves your life with a transponder call, even if he doesn't do it directly. But when Monet brings in the Strawhats' dozing receiver snail and the voices of your crew pour out, it knocks out your breath all the same, and it's because of him that they reach you, that they know where you are, that you end up hearing them at all.

You'd wanted to die without speaking to them again, to make it easier for them, for you. You'd imagined them sailing onward to Raftel. You hadn't expected the tears that sting at your eyes and stream down your face when you hear them shout _we miss you, come home_ , Jean Bart's voice booming _s'il vous plait, capitaine._

_smoke billows out when you break the glass of the window and_  
_pull penguin and shachi through, one after the other, out of the building that you set on fire._  
_(he had you learn tactics, medicine, firearms, politics, explosives and demolitions. bombs are easy)_  
_they cough and they ask who you are and they give you their names: you tell them_  
_you're here to break the celestial dragons, do they want to come with you? penguin grins huge,_  
_tosses her braid over her shoulder, gives a little salute._  
_sure thing, captain_

It's overwhelming, how much they want you, how cruel you are for wanting to leave them. The guilt rolls over you like a wave, and you manage to get out only "I can't hear you if you all talk at once," over the clamor.

(You can hardly breathe for the sobs you swallow immediately after. You never thought this would be their reaction. You never thought anyone could miss you so much, that anyone could need you so much to keep going.)

It shocks you right down to your damaged bones how much you miss them. And when your navigator takes the receiver and tells you that all of them have decided that they won't go to Raftel without you, well; that's when you break, that's the last weight tipping the balance, the last straw on this camel's back. You can't leave them, not now, not yet, they need you too much for you to get off so easy.

Faced with so much evidence, you're forced to reconcile Joker's lie and what you know at last: that if choosing to live is the greatest challenge then it must take the greatest strength, and it's the choice you have to make.

You say, "I will," and you say "I'll come home," and it takes everything you have but you mean it. You almost bark the "I promise!" that follows, and after that you don't say anything else, because they're cheering at you from the other end of the line and you're crying like you haven't since you were ten, not since you were surrounded by ashes and corpses and a burning city. (But it's different, this time, and far harder: you're not alone and it's you doing the choosing, _you_ , not fear and adrenaline and trauma warped into enough will to make you survive.)

When the call is concluded you call over the reindeer, and he hands you the vial: and if the medicine goes down bitter and burning, then it's only right that it does.

*

You can't figure him out, and the worst part about it is that you don't understand yourself any better than him.

What he's done for you isn't something you can express; he's helped slay your demons, he's forced you to live, he's made you face a future you never expected to have. (You're grateful. You're not. You can't decide from one moment to the next, and either way the enormity of what he's done for you is still clear. You've been running after him since the moment you met him. Now you've found that the road you thought short is still going, going, he's going to pull you along to the end.)

What you want from him—what you want—

You only know how to define things in terms of action: people to kill, plans to complete, operations to execute. Defining something in terms of _want_ is foreign, for all that you're a pirate and pirates take what they want. Wants aren't finite, they aren't objectives, they're indefinite, they're something you don't entirely understand.

_the best is to do what you like, he insists, and you argue that it isn't, that even for pirates_  
_the world isn't so malleable, it's impractical; and even as you say the words you're not sure_  
_that you believe them, you want to believe as he does, to live in a world_  
_where the wind in the sails is all that you need,_  
_where just because you want you can have_

(Your heart beats double-time when he's near you. He likes your spots. He wants you to live. He's given you the gift of a world without Joker. He's left you to nightmares, to memories, to having to face every new day. He didn't kiss you back.)

And so the second time you kiss him (the last time) it's to answer a question, not to understand him but to understand you.

You do it the day before you reach Zou—you ask him, and he shrugs and says _if it makes you happy_ , and you throw yourself into it like you always have into everything, with all you've got: and you pull him down by the lapels to the cot you still occupy in the medbay and you kiss him, deep and desperate, question asked.

He doesn't kiss you back this time, either, and you expected that, you don't mind; but you thought that you'd feel something, a drop of your heart, a jump in your pulse, _something._

You don't, and maybe that's your question answered only you can't be sure: no clear no and no clear yes, just you, kissing him, one of his hands hanging loose at his side and the other gently drawn through your hair.

When you let him go he meets your eyes and he asks, "Did you get what you wanted?" perfectly innocent, not at all taunting, and you open your mouth to say _yes_ even though you mean _no_ —

And the third time, the third time there's him and a kiss and you and more than a whim: he takes your hands and folds them in his ( _liege lord and vassal_ ; your loyalty his, your life for his own) and he kisses your knuckles, and you can only conclude that you'll never understand him at all.

He says, "We're almost at Zou," and he grins at you. "Are you coming?"

_you're standing on Raftel looking over his shoulder_  
_as he readies to bound up the hill_  
_with you scrambling after_

You stare up at him, your hands still in his own, oath sealed, bond made.

Leagues and leagues from Dressrosa, sixteen years since you died, at the beginning of the rest of your life; you breathe in, and you lean your forehead against your hands in his, and you answer.


End file.
